The Real-Estate CRUNCH - habitat protection may actually harm certain species

Not far from Crystal Cove, Monica Florian explains over the steady clamor of bulldozers that we are standing beside a nature reserve set aside by the Irvine Company, where she is senior vice president. The company has built the largest master-planned urban environment in the United States on massive landholdings that it acquired in its cattle-ranching days. It has created communities that together house 200,000 residents. More are in the planning stage, and the construction of others, such as this block of Newport Coast, is under way.

Here, in the Newport Hills Development, a swath of three-story homes rises like a king's court above the ocean views on one side of the reserve. Protected space, dotted with cell phone towers and crisscrossed with small roadways, lies on the other. That space is part of 38,000 acres set aside from development; the Irvine Company is free to build on the remainder of its 216,000-acre regional holdings. The set-aside includes 17,000 acres of public land combined with 21,000 acres of land from the Irvine Company--only 4,000 acres of which were not previously under some sort of protection. The reserve system, making up the Nature Reserve of Orange County, is designed to safeguard 40 rare species in what is now the largest remaining habitat block in the county.

Florian admits that the NCCP process and the federal no-surprises guarantees are what it took to bring companies such as hers willingly to the planning table. "To address endangered-species issues," she says, "we have to find a way to deal with them on private land. The NCCP seemed like a better way to do business."

Business indeed. But how much should private business concerns be allowed to extract from the environment, and how much should be left for the less defined public, or environmental, good? Even before the NCCPs went into place allowing development on coastal sage scrub inhabited by the gnatcatcher and other rare species, only 10 percent of the region's sage scrub habitat remained. "When we say there's only 10 percent of this area left," says Klippstein, "that means there's 10 pieces of the pie and 9 of them are gone. When developers come in and say, `We want the last piece,' you stab them with a fork and say, `No, you've already had 9.'"

Joni Praded is a contributing editor for Animals.

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